found_drama

Back from Myrtle Beach! Aside from being sick pretty much the entire time, it was awesome. The Boy loved the ocean, otters, and eating cheeseburgers whole. We loved the fresh seafood, catching up with the family, and the non-freezing temperatures¹.

1. Not that Vermont has exactly had the coldest winter this past season. [↩]

• Goodnight Forest Moon
  at DzignSpace (via B²) — absolutely OMG awesome Star Wars + Goodnight Moon mash-up
  (tagged: starwars kids literature )

UPDATE: Something seemed to shove in a whole bunch of “500 Error” links into this linkdump. I’ve since removed those (leaving “Goodnight Forest Moon” all by its lonesome) and am looking into the cause to prevent future occurrences of that annoyance.

• The Hacker Crackdown
  via lawnczar — just in time for the 20th anniversary of the Steve Jackson Games raid; Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown in HTML
  (tagged: history hackers government censorship )
• The Steve Jackson Games Raid was 20 years ago
  at Beyond The Beyond (via lawnczar) — 20th anniversary of the Steve Jackson Games raid
  (tagged: history hackers government censorship )
• What the JavaScript RegExp API Got Wrong, & How to Fix It
  Steve Levithan at Flagrant Badassery and his "95 [regex] theses nailed to the ES3 cathedral door"; or, what's wrong with regular expressions in JavaScript, and a more than a few suggestions on how to fix it.
  (tagged: javascript regex essay work todo )
• User Interface as Customer Service
  at 52 Weeks of UX:
  

  In its place is embedded support: directions, tips, cues, and other signposts that can nudge us back on track.

  …this is a trend about which I have mixed feelings.

  (tagged: ui ux customerservice essay work )
• "hey lazy web – is there something that will sync my OS X Dock…"
  At lazytweet.com — my question about syncing the Dock Stacks and Places in the Finder sidebar.
  (tagged: OSX Finder )

Post-apocalyptic? Under a subterranean sky? Civilizations crumble; infrastructures crumble. You band together with whomever is left, with whomever you are close to when it all went down. Folks from work; the odds were in favor of it being them. Holed up somewhere, we all load up—stuff backpacks full of provisions: food, rope, matches, green metal bottles full of whatever water will still run out of the sputtering taps. I go back for a sword—a gleaming katana. My travel-mates poke fun at me (“What good will that do us?”) but I don’t see any of them going back for weapons. And why shouldn’t we carry at least one of these, at least something like this? There are bound to be more folks out there—some of them may even be marauding. Didn’t any of you read The Road?  So they press on ahead.  ”I’ll catch up.”  And it takes a while but I figure out a way to get the katana attached.  But it’s difficult to move with both the blade and the backpack over-stuffed with gear and food.  I run a rope out the window and rappel down the side, looking up at the stone sky, hoping that everyone is already safe at the bottom when I get there.

Calvert Asylum
celebrate his catalog
Git for Domo Kun

“Search Term Haiku” is a series wherein I examine this site’s log files and construct one or more haiku poems from search terms and phrases that led visitors to the site. Where possible, I attempt to keep the search phrases intact. However, as these are haiku poems, I do need to follow the rules.

• Designing User Interfaces For Business Web Applications
  at Smashing Magazine
  (tagged: webdev design ui usability ux prototyping work todo )
• Ten rules for writing fiction(part two)
  via B² — …and 2 of 2.
  (tagged: writing inspiration )
• Ten rules for writing fiction
  via B² — Inspired by (and including) the ten rules from Elmore Leonard. These are great lists; though not nearly as beautiful as the actual physical copy of the Leonard book. 1 of 2.
  (tagged: writing inspiration )
• Foyer Clohting: Is this intentional? Did nobody…
  stevenf.com – asking the important questions. again. so soon.
  (tagged: spelling )
• Flickr: The defaced presidents Pool
  via B² — illegal, but fun.
  (tagged: design art humor )
• My Solar System 2.02
  Holy crap! Awesome.  For super-fantastic sumulations like this one:
  
  (tagged: science space games fun astronomy math physics awesome )

• Op-Ed Columnist – The Fat Lady Has Sung
  at NYTimes.com — $300 911 calls and:
  

  C-Span is just ESPN with only two teams.

  (tagged: politics economy )
• What really happens when you navigate to a URL
  (tagged: webdev tutorial tech network http )
• Coconut & Lime: Asiago & Crab Macaroni & Cheese
  (tagged: recipe )
• The Mariana Trench To Scale
  at I Am Bored (via DF) — holy WTF
  (tagged: design science reference visualization illustration )
• Indian-Spiced Roast Salmon
  at Recipezaar
  (tagged: salmon recipe )

• Souders blasts off 5 in a row
  at Ajaxian
  (tagged: html performance javascript css webdev work todo )
• Over Fifteen Pounds of Book!!–Knowing Darkness: Artists Inspired by Stephen King
  at Omnivoracious — looks pretty awesome
  (tagged: art wishlist )
• Comcast enters rebranding territory
  at The Boston Globe (via /.):
  

  W2 Group’s Weber said such a rebranding is “a bit old-fashioned’’ and a new name is unlikely to impress consumers. “I think the public is smarter than that now,’’ he said.

  Glad to hear them at least acknowledge that. Re-branding is a terrible idea unless you plan to back it up with real changes. As an unhappy-but-basically-locked-in Comcast customer, I hope this is the real thing.

  (tagged: Comcast Xfinity news )
• Writing Efficient JavaScript
  (tagged: javascript webdev work performance todo )
• Clifton, honored poet from Buffalo, dies
  At The Buffalo News — sad news.
  (tagged: SMCM poet Maryland )
• eReading
  FemaleScienceProfessor:
  

  I miss the beauty of real books and the the variety of fonts and book designs. And I miss having a physical sense for how long a book is. The Kindle method of reporting the % of each book read is deeply unsatisfying. However, I find the Kindle pages very easy to read and navigate, and clicking to turn the page can be extremely handy when you have a large cat pinning down one your arms.

  (tagged: Kindle books reading ereading )

• New Russian botnet tries to kill rival
  at Network World (via /.)
  (tagged: spam security network research )
• Estimating programming time
  at ITworld (via /.)
  (tagged: software programming work )
• The government has your baby’s DNA
  at CNN.com (via /.)
  (tagged: politics news dna privacy genetics paranoia future research )
• Google Plans To Deliver 1Gb/sec Fiber-Optic Broadband Network To More Than 50,000 Homes
  Bring it.
  (tagged: tech google broadband )
• Dealer.com expanding; the question is, where?
  (tagged: Dealer.com news Burlington Vermont )
• Shokan Coachworks
  Audi parts 1-800-All-Audi — I'm told this is the best place for deals on Audi parts.
  (tagged: Audi parts )

While I was reading this, I liked to imagine that I was at university and that Douglas Crockford was the insanely popular genius professor that showed up late for lectures, and then either spoke too fast or else mumbled a lot, and then locked himself in his office refusing to answer the door during office hours while he worked on his Next Big Thing that would make everyone oooh and aaah and validate his brilliance.  Meanwhile, in that same imaginary university, Nicholas Zakas was the graduate student that served as the TA to that class—and he happened to be equally brilliant and super-accessible and willing to take the time out to explain it all in a way that was thorough and comprehensible.

So that being said, if you consider yourself or would like to consider yourself a professional front-end engineer for web applications (or in any way want to become a JavaScript expert), I cannot recommend this book enough.  On the one hand, you have Crockford’s The Good Parts—which does a great job of eviscerating JavaScript while at the same time extracting its (well…) its Good Parts—but it’s like someone ran the text through a minification utility and made it tokenized and super-dense and stripped out all the comments.  And on the other hand, you have Zakas’ Professional JavaScript for Web Developers which one might describe as The Good Parts (the long version).

What Zakas gives us—while assuming that you are already doing some professional JavaScript web development—is a good overview of JavaScript/ECMAScript, with special care given to make the text practical.  This is not strictly an academic exercise; he is careful to make sure that each example applies to real world scenarios (i.e., web apps running in a browser) and that you are able to take away something useful and meaningful from the text’s discussion.  In other words, he provides a road map for how to make the most of JavaScript as a language¹ and how to make it work in all the convoluted, counter-intuitive situations that you are basically guaranteed to encounter².

In a nutshell, if you are doing professional web development on the front end, this book needs to be on your desk.  I can’t wait to check out his next book³…

BONUS ROUND: Zakas says that Wrox has made this book available as a DRM-free ebook.

DOUBLE BONUS ROUND: Apparently, I made the man laugh.

1. …since, as a front-end engineer on the web, you’re stuck with it. [↩]
2. Even if you don’t expect to ever work with XML.  Even if you do think that the JavaScript 2 and ECMAScript 4 stuff is a little too future-forward/in-the-weeds type stuff. [↩]
3. Reading this before Feburary 24, 2010?  Sign up for your chance at a free copy! [↩]